is there an infinitely large integer type?

This is a discussion on is there an infinitely large integer type? within the C++ Programming forums, part of the General Programming Boards category; Is there an infinitely large integer file. I am writing a program that processes large files, and I need to ...

>I need to make an infinitewly large array
You can't do this because of memory constraints.

>I am writing a program that processes large files
I doubt that you have to process the entire file in memory all at once. Read a block of the file and process it, then save that block to disk and read another. Lather, rinse, repeat until the file has been completely processed.

your idea is fine, but i need infinitely large integer because I am calculating the total number of nonnumerical values in each column of data (a 100MB file), and then replace those nonnumerical values with numbers in the order of their sequence in the array.

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What you're talking about is arbitrary precision arithmetic. You define your own number using either linked lists or an array so that you can have a huge precision in your calculation or you can use enormous numbers. Like if you're using an array, you can have a portable number up to 32,767 digits. But I imagine that for your problem a double would work fine.